Announcement graphic for a scientific publication in Environmental Research Letters titled "National-scale field delineation in Mozambique refines our understanding of cropland distribution, field size, and deforestation actors" by Rufin, Hammer et al. The central feature is a map of Mozambique color-coded by Mean Field Size, ranging from 0.01 hectares (tan) to 2.50 hectares (teal). Additionally, various maps and statistical graphs regarding mean field size show close-up field boundaries across the country and correlate field size with variables such as cropland fraction, travel time, and population density. The background is dark navy blue, right bottom corner shows the Earth Observation Lab pictogram, a satellite orbiting a globe.

New publication out now!

@philrufin.bsky.social, Pauline Hammer et al. mapped 17M fields in Mozambique using deep learning and satellite imagery. With 78% of fields being <0.5 ha, this provides critical data for sustainable land use policies!

Read more here: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

🙏 Huge thanks to all contributors:
@K. Ansbak Petersen, @danielmu11er.bsky.social, M. Rudbeck Jepsen, @kelewinska.bsky.social, N. Dolu, and L. Müller!

📥 Download v1.3 on Zenodo:
zenodo.org/records/1867...

#EuropeLAND #EU #HorizonEurope #LandUse #LULUC #Agriculture #OpenData

🛠️ Cleaned & Reliable Geodata

We’ve polished the engine:
✅ Removed duplicates and empty geometries.
✅ Ensured truly unique Field-IDs.
✅ Fixed missing crop info for field blocks (e.g., Ireland).

🌱 Smarter Classification

• Mixed Classes: Now differentiating pure crops from cereal-legume mixes or agroforestry.
• Granular Details: New subclasses for greenhouses, potato seasons, and landscape elements.
• AI-Enhanced: Used LLMs to audit crop translations and HCAT classes. 🤖

New Regions & Years

We’ve expanded our footprint!
📍 New: Baden-Württemberg (DE), Bulgaria, Tuscany (IT) & Wallonia (BE).

⏳ Extended Time Series: We added 2024/2025 data for Austria, Czechia, Netherlands, Portugal, and many more. Long-term trend analysis just got a lot easier! 📈

We’re excited to announce a major update to the Harmonized IACS Inventory (v1.3)!

Thread below for what’s new! 👇

#IACS #GIS #OpenAccess

Are you IACS data user? Please consider participating in this survey and collect some karma points.

Just published 🌱:
We dug into 16 million+ field records across Central Europe to find out what drives farmers’ crop rotation choices.
Turns out past cropping, agronomic advice, and legume prices matter a lot and legumes are likely to play a much bigger role in the future👉 doi.org/10.1016/j.ag...

#EAAE2025 🚨: What is the role of land use/ownership concentration for land prices? Evidence for Brandenburg by @cjaenicke.bsky.social + @stefanseifert.bsky.social

Join us on Wednesday, August 27, at 5:45 pm 👉 Poster screen 3

🦋 The Land System Group is now on Bluesky!
We're excited to share some interesting insights from our research group at IAMO. Keep up to date by following us.

Header Image of Maize field with a picture of Esther Shupel Ibrahim and text: Research for Smallholder Farmers' Food Security in Nigeria

Using Remote Sensing and Agro-Ecosystem Modelling 🛰️🌽📈, Esther Shupel Ibrahim analyzes impacts of climate change and diseases on smallholder agriculture in Nigeria and develops strategies to support and empower smallholder farmers.
Find out more about her PhD research in this StoryMap:
arcg.is/1bG48K

Field and farm-level data on agricultural land use for the European Union - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Field and farm-level data on agricultural land use for the European Union

A comprehensive field- and farm-level land-use dataset from the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) is now available: doi.org/10.1038/s415... #OpenData #EUAgri #LandUse #SustainableFarming

Neue Studie zu #Glyphosat. 💥
👉 "Jeder Haushalt 🏠 trägt dazu bei, dass dieses Gift die Natur belastet."

Damit ist die These, dass die hohe Belastung in Gewässern nicht nur aus der #Landwirtschaft 🚜 stammt, sondern zu großen Anteilen aus 🏘 Haushaltsabwässern, bestätigt.
Bericht im DLF 📻
👇

Grafik: #WirSindBUA

🫧 #WirSindBUA: Die @berlinualliance.bsky.social hat wasserbezogene Risiken des Klimawandels zu einem ihrer Forschungsschwerpunkte gemacht, u. a. mit der Einstein Research Unit „CliWaC“. #HU-Prof. Dr. Tobias Krüger spricht über die bisherigen Forschungserkenntnisse 👉 www.hu-berlin.de/de/pr/wir-si...

Screenshot of paper "Connecting habitats in European agricultural landscapes: Farmers' spatial preferences for linear wildlife corridors" by Klebl, Rhodes, Häfner and Piorr Abstract: Habitat fragmentation in agricultural landscapes threatens biodiversity. Enhancing landscape connectivity across cultivated areas requires a thorough understanding of farmers’ spatial considerations and their willingness to create semi-natural habitats. We therefore conducted a spatial choice experiment with farmers from ten European countries to assess their preferences for placing linear wildlife habitats (hedgerows and wildflower strips) at the field scale under different scenarios, as well as the role of farm and personal factors. A total of 471 responses were analysed using multinomial logistic regression and generalised linear mixed models. The results indicate that landscape conditions, including field shape, slope, soil quality, and pre-existing landscape features, exert a significant influence on farmers’ decisions, as do the size of machinery, cultural regions, attitudes towards biodiversity, and type of intervention. On the other hand, no statistical significance was found for other variables. In general, farmers’ choices were driven by a desire to minimise disturbance to field work, optimise productivity, increase biodiversity, and address specific environmental challenges. The insights into farmers’ decision-making from this study can inform ecological network planning to reduce transaction costs by preselecting likely adopters, and to mitigate resistance and lower financial compensation by identifying best-fit options aligned with farmers’ practices. Integrating these findings into geospatial models could improve predictions of the impact of spatially targeted biodiversity conservation strategies on landscape composition and future biodiversity trends in agricultural areas.

Really cool and informative paper by Fabian Klebl and others on farmers' preferences for where to locate hedges or wildlife strips. Highly recommended (only wrinkle for me: no German case study😕). #biodiversity #agriculture
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Logo of the Earth Observation Lab of Humboldt University Berlin on background false-color satellite image showing contrasting agricultural systems at the Turkish-Syrian border.

Return of the good times: the Earth Observation Lab of @humboldtuni.bsky.social has joined Bluesky: Follow @humboldteolab.bsky.social for all things terrestrial remote sensing and geospatial at large!

Ups, I didn't know that there is a new link: zenodo.org/records/1438...

It's already version 1.1, we are basically flying :D! (irony off)
Unfortunately, we discovered some major flaws in the first version that needed to be fixed.

Please spread the word about this great database. It was a lot of work :).

In addition to the crop codes, we also collected farm identifiers, which we are allowed to share for 6 countries, and organic vs. conventional management information, which we can share for 4 countries.

We collected, with the help of all our project partners, as many as possible available IACS/GSA data. Building on the work of the EuroCrops project (eurocrops.tum.de/), we harmonized the land-use information, i.e., the crop codes, as well as the data structure.

Our project released one of our milestones; a harmonized database of field-level land use data for almost all countries of the EU with a temporal coverage of up to 20 years. You can find it here: zenodo.org/records/1423...

My daughter sent me this and I think it’s kind of funny/true

Wir zeigen auf, dass es einer differenzierten Betrachtung von Eigentums- und Nutzungsstrukturen bedarf, und plädieren für eine ehröhte Transparenz des Bodenmarkts um politische Entscheidungen besser zu fundieren und die Ausgangsbedingungen für alle Marktteilnehmer zu verbessern. lnkd.in/eQ8_My-i

🚜 Wem gehört das Land? 🌾 (1/2)
In unserem neuesten Policy Brief werfen Alfons Balmann, Daniel Müller und ich einen genaueren Blick auf das landwirtschaftliche Bodeneigentum in Brandenburg. Unsere Analyse zeigt: Der Boden gehört vielen – eine breite Streuung des Eigentums ist zu beobachten.

6) On the local market, the ownership concentration rarely exceeds common thresholds of market concentration that indicate potential market power (Figure 2 below). When these thresholds are exceeded, public institutions are often the largest owners.

5)
We find examples of non-agricultural investors owning larger areas, but identifying them was difficult. Also, successor companies to the agriculture productive companies own larger areas. These companies constitute an entry point for investors to quickly take control of large areas.

4)
The largest owners are diverse. We identified public institutions, agricultural company networks, and non-profit organizations among the largest individual owners.

3)
Land ownership is fragmented, more than the actual land use. There are much more landowners (~185,000) than farmers (5,000), and parcels are much smaller than the fields.

More than half of the land is owned by private persons who are not active in agriculture but only own a few ha.

2) We used all available cadastral data on agricultural land in 2020 and combined it with information on company networks.
We categorized all landowners and researched the largest 15 owners in detail.
We calculated concentration measures for the local market to investigate potential market power.

Revealing agricultural land ownership concentration with cadastral and company network data - Agriculture and Human Values In many high-income countries, agricultural land is highly concentrated in a few hands, but detailed knowledge of ownership structures is limited. We examined land ownership structures and agricultura...

Who owns the agricultural land, and how concentrated is land ownership? Knowledge about this is minimal, although being at the center of heated debates. This motivated us to examine land ownership structures for Brandenburg in detail. Read up on our results here: doi.org/10.1007/s104...